Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. Van Vogt

Author:A. E. Van Vogt [A. E. Van Vogt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2002-12-25T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

HOW IN THE NAME of all the hells can anything live in intergalactic space?”

The voice, strained and unrecognizable, came through the communicator of Grosvenor’s space suit as he stood with the others near the air lock. It seemed to him that the question made the little group of men crowd closer together. For him, the proximity of the others was not quite enough. He was too aware of the impalpable yet inconceivable night that coiled about them, pressing down to the very blazing portholes.

Almost for the first time since the voyage had begun, the immensity of that darkness struck home to Grosvenor. He had looked at it so often from inside the ship that he had become indifferent. But now he was suddenly aware that man’s farthest stellar frontiers were but a pin point in this blackness that reached billions of light-years in every direction.

The voice of Director Morton broke through the scared silence. “Calling Gunlie Lester inside the ship… Gunlie Lester …”

There was a pause; then, “Yes, Director?”

Grosvenor recognized the voice of the head of the astronomy department.

“Gunlie,” Morton went on, “here’s something for your astro-mathematical brain. Will you please give us the ratio of chance that blew out the drivers of the Beagle at the exact point in space where that thing was floating? Take a few hours to work it out.”

The words brought the whole scene into even sharper focus. It was typical of mathematician Morton that he let another man have the limelight in a field in which he himself was a master.

The astronomer laughed, then said in an earnest tone, “I don’t have to do any figuring. One would need a new system of notation to express the chance arithmetically. What you’ve got out there can’t happen, mathematically speaking. Here we are, a shipload of human beings, stopping for repairs halfway between two galaxies—the first time we’ve ever sent an expedition outside our own island universe. Here we are, I say, a tiny point intersecting without prearrangement exactly the path of another, tinier point. It’s impossible, unless space is saturated with such creatures.”

It seemed to Grosvenor that there was a more likely explanation. The two events could conceivably be in the simple relationship of cause and effect. A huge hole had been burned in the engine-room wall. Torrents of energy had poured out into space. Now they had stopped to repair the damage. He parted his lips to say as much, and then closed them. There was another factor, the factor of the forces and probabilities involved in that assumption. Just how much power would be needed to drain the output of a pile of a few minutes? Briefly he considered the formula applicable, and shook his head slightly. The figures that came through were so enormous that the hypothesis he had intended to offer seemed automatically ruled out. A thousand coeurls among them couldn’t have handled energy in such quantities, which suggested that machines, not individuals, were involved.

Somebody was saying, “We ought to turn a mobile unit on anything that looks like that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.